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the_king

I cannot wait for Starship to become a real thing, but you have to admit it's way behind schedule. The engines are awesome now.
Re:GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics on Saturday February 14, 2026 @02:29AM (#47012452)
This it is very impressive. But scrolling through the preprint, I wouldn't call any of it elegant.

I'm not blaming the model here, but Python is much easier to read and more universal than math notation in most cases (especially for whatever's going on at the bottom of page four). I guess I'll have one translate the PDF.

Re:Gemini 3 Deep Think on Friday February 13, 2026 @12:40AM (#46999291)
I just tested it on a very difficult Raven matrix, that the old version of DeepThink, as well as GPT 5.2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6, and pretty much every other model failed at.

This version of DeepSeek got it first try. Thinking time was 2 or 3 minutes.

The visual reasoning of this class of Gemini models is incredibly impressive.

Re: on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @02:32AM (#46430533)
I think good names and a good file structure are the most important thing to get right here.
Totally understand, thanks for being a customer. I'm sorry we weren't able to make the web version as smooth as we wanted to.

We do plan to support Linux. This was probably a little bit of a blind spot for us - not realizing that anyone running a Linux desktop doesn't even have system voice tool to fall back on.

I think Aqua v1 had two problems:

1. The models weren't ready.

2. The interactions were often strained. Not every edit/change is easy to articulate with your voice.

If 1 had been our only problem, we might have had a hit. In reality, I think optimizing model errors allowed us to ignore some fundamental awkwardness in the experience. We've tried to rectify this with v2 by putting less emphasis on streaming for every interaction and less emphasis on commands, replacing it with context.

Hopefully it can become a tool in the toolbox.

Re:Firebase Studio on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @11:05PM (#43640233)
you've got nothing to worry about here.

if firebase studio can make a todo app, i'd be surprised. this is the worst "vibe coding" tool i've ever used.

We can do that, with some help from the community.
thanks!

I share the same sentiment. I remember thinking in college how annoying it was that I was reading low-resolution, marked-up, skewed, b&w scans of a book using Adobe Acrobat while CS concentrators were doing everything in VS Code (then brand new).

but we do think voice is actually great with Cursor. It’s also really useful in the terminal for certain things. Checking out or creating branches, for example.

Aqua is in another league when it comes to accuracy. I just ran them side by side on a simple q to ChatGPT and here were the results...

Aqua Voice

  What is the first recorded eclipse in human history? I'm not asking when the first one occurred, but the first written record we have of an eclipse.
Windows Voice Typing (v11 24H2, Dell XPS 13 9340)

  What is the first recorded eclipse in human history i'm not asking 1 like the first occurred but the first ridden record we have of an eclipse

Windows mistakes were:

-"1" should be "when"

-"ridden" should be "written"

-No punctuation

thanks! We're working on iOS, but it's tough to get the ergos right given all of Apple's restrictions and neglected APIs.
Re:Firebase Studio on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @09:57PM (#43639905)
I was excited to try this out because I've had a lot of trouble getting the Supabase integrations to work on Lovable and Bolt.new.

Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4.

Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.

We're building something different, but there is some overlap. Aqua is built for max speed, while keeping accuracy high. To achieve that, inference runs in a datacenter (for now).

You can customize Aqua using custom instructions, similar to ChatGPT custom instructions, and get some Talon functionality from it:

In my own, I have:

1. Breaking the paragraphs with three or four sentences.

2. Don't start a sentence with "and".

3. Use lowercase in Slack and iMessage.

4. Here are some common terminal commands...

Thanks!

We're faster, more accurate, and have a streaming option. Aqua can go from key-up to paste in as little as 450ms. Flow was closer to 1000 in our tests.

Overall, you'll notice we make a few more tweaks to the output than Wisprflow.

For example, Aqua + Cursor is very powerful - we syntax highlight your transcript. The easiest way to see this is to use streaming mode (double press Fn) + deep context + cursor and try asking it to change something.

This also works in other "context rich" environments.

We're more accurate and much faster than Mac Whisper, even their strongest model (Whisper Cpp Large V3).

For that benchmarking table, you can use Whisper Large V3 as a stand-in for Mac Whisper and Super Whisper accuracy.

Shoot, might be due to AirPods mic init latency. AirPods work well on Desktop (though their mic quality isn't the best).

Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

https://withaqua.com

Hey HN - It’s Finn and Jack from Aqua Voice (https://withaqua.com). Aqua is fast AI dictation for your desktop and our attempt to make voice a first-class input method.Video: https://withaqua.com/watchTry it here: https://withaqua.com/sandboxFinn is uber dyslexic and has been using dictation software since sixth grade. For over a decade, he’s been chasing a dream that never quite worked — using...

( Read More... | 83 comments | 15 points | on HN )
Re:We were wrong about GPUs on Saturday February 15, 2025 @12:56AM (#43056262)
This is well written. I appreciated the line, "startups are a race to learn stuff."
Files-to-prompt has been a surprisingly useful tool for this kind of workflow.

https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt

Re:George R.R. Martin has co-authored a physics paper on Thursday January 23, 2025 @12:54PM (#42806217)
Reminds me of some underrated Peter Thiel advice: almost always an extra hour invested in a project you’re already deeply into will have greater returns than starting some totally tangential thing from scratch.

The tangential thing will always feel better because you make rapid progress at the start, but the real returns come from completion.

It may turn out that in the “next epoch,” our stock market will be understood as our civilization's greatest work of art - our greatest cathedral to capitalism.
Sounds more like they were (and still are) being sloppy. “be better” is one thing. “runs without fatal crash” is what semi is talking about.
> It’s not just that it’s immature software, they need to change how they do development.

I remember geohot saying something similar about a year ago

Re:Aqua Voice (YC W24) for Desktop on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @10:29AM (#42388731)
Re:Aqua Voice (YC W24) for Desktop on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @10:19AM (#42388611)
Yes! It's fully real time. This was a challenge, but something we decided not to compromise on.

Imagine a pen that was only showing you words at the end of a paragraph — that'd be crazy! But this is how most people use voice today because real time is so hard. Latency is 800ms-2000ms from speech.

Aqua Voice (YC W24) for Desktop

Hey, this is Finn from Aqua Voice. Today we're releasing Aqua Voice for Desktop (https://withaqua.com). Aqua is a voice-driven text editor that lets you dictate using natural language commands.The desktop experience is the best way to use Aqua yet. It lets you talk easily into any app and comes with:- Custom dictionary: can have up to 800 words/phrases at a time, no pronunciation tuning...

( Read More... | 9 comments | 9 points | on HN )
Re:Starship IFT-6 Livestream (liftoff at 4pm CT) on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @05:21PM (#42188734)
I would love to see the dashboard that the team that made the decision was looking at.

I'd be interested to hear speculation by people who know about this as to what they think went wrong. Was it off course? Did the engines not relight in time? Did it not have enough fuel?

Anthropic's latest 3.5 sonnet is a cut above GPT-4 and 4.0. And if someone had given it to me and said, here's GPT-4.5, I would have been very happy with it.

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